It's not supply and demand, though, because the increases are well beyond vacancy pressures. I currently live in a large luxury apartment complex in a cosmopol

It's not supply and demand, though, because the increases are well beyond vacancy pressures. I currently live in a large luxury apartment complex in a cosmopolitan city with a moderately high vacancy rate. I'm about to move out because of a large rent increase. Easily half the units in my complex are empty. Any reasonable person would look at that and say "gee, we need to bring prices down so that we have higher occupancy. Every month that a unit stands empty we're losing a whole month's rent." Instead they use RealPage. It's obvious when a complex does this because the prices change day by day and negotiation is impossible. All the other apartment complexes in this city are using the same software. Even if RealPage isn't a collusive conspiracy any error in their pricing algorithm affects the entire city. Rent on private houses are not set by RealPage so you can rent a large house here for what an apartment costs. Apartments are uniformly priced well above the "real" market price set by supply and demand. The entire city's vacancy slice is concentrated in the apartment buildings. In order to rent apartments at above market prices the apartments here have gotten slack about income verification and background checks. The only people who want to rent an apartment for well above a mortgage payment are small-time drug-dealers who have enough income to pay but not enough clean income to get a mortgage. RealPage is a market-distorting force. Inherently. In order to not distort the market they'd have to always evaluate supply and demand correctly.